Well, that depends on whether you think the Greenway actually belonged to the people in the first place. Do you know who owns Boston’s parks? Here’s a quick year-end quiz! Take it, and ponder what we have learned in 2011 about parks, people, power, money, responsibility, and freedom.

1.E Although the Norman B. Leventhal Park, a.k.a. Post Office Square, is currently owned by a private trust, the City of Boston will take over the park once all its debts are paid off—in 2028.

2.F Fidelity Investments leases Eastport Park‘s land from the Massachusetts Port Authority—but it must remain open to the public under Massachusetts Chapter 91, which requires public access to all waterfront development. The park became famous in 2001, a year after the park opened, when Fidelity Investments sought to redesign the park and remove a site-specific sculpture (involving 200 tons of Maine granite) by sculptor David Phillips. Phillips sued and lost, but Fidelity seems to have left the sculpture in place.

3.C The Boston Common is a genuine city-owned park open to the public… most of the time. The City of Boston has enforced a nighttime curfew there since 2007, and the rules of the Boston Park Commission specify “no person shall… enter, or remain in, any public park between the hours of 11:30 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. on any day except for the purpose of going through such park on the walks or malls thereof…” But even the Common isn’t immune to the marketplace. Mayor Menino and The Friends of the Public Garden, a nonprofit citizens advocacy group, were widely criticized in 2010 for seeking to expand corporate sponsorship and advertising on the Common.

4.D (Mostly) Set on the grounds of the former Boston State Hospital, this Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary is the site of the Clark-Cooper Community Garden. Clark-Cooper was organized in 1968 by local families from Roxbury and Mattapan, 28 years before Mass Audubon took over the site; the garden is “an autonomous incorporated entity,” according to the Rappaport Institute’s Heart of the City site.